I’ve always had a soft spot for the fictional antihero. Many of my favourite books and TV shows feature such characters. I am not talking about villains here but a character, a protagonist, who takes centre stage in the story but doesn’t embody all the traditional good qualities associated with your typical fictional hero. Antiheroes are complex, dynamic, fully fleshed characters who are all too human and often provide a dash of humour in the dark world they inhabit, so it’s no surprise that the popularity of shows and books featuring these protagonists persist on our screens and on our bookshelves.
When Nick Dunne in the novel Gone Girl begins his monologue describing the insides of his wife’s skull, we don’t expect in a few short chapters to be sympathising with his plight. He’s selfish, lazy and quite at the mercy of his own inertia. His lack of self-awareness and inability to hit the correct social cues when it comes to the investigation of his wife’s potential murder give him a vulnerability that makes us wince. We can’t help but feel sorry for him.
In Breaking Bad, life has dealt Walter White more than a bad hand. We see him, on his 50th birthday, watching his macho brother-in-law’s latest drug-money bust, and in that perfectly crafted moment, we find ourselves thinking that maybe going into the crystal meth business wouldn’t be such a bad idea. For him. When Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley takes on the persona of Dickie Greenleaf it almost feels justified. I mean, we’d never do it. But we can understand why he does. How do we end up rooting for the antihero?
In her earliest notes on the novel that was to become The Talented Mr Ripley, Highsmith perfectly encapsulates the allure of the antihero: “He could, in the course of the story, effect a purge of himself, becoming actually heroic and even altruistic at the end. He has the analytical capacity to understand all this while it is going on. He cannot do anything about it until he is faced with a choice, which enables him to show what he is made of (good and bad choices) and to turn his back, by choice on what he has done before.”
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The key word here is ‘could’. This is the carrot we follow. The hope that our antihero, should life offer the right sequence of events, could make a different choice. We are entranced by both the idea of the antihero’s redemption and their chaos. And when our antihero makes a good choice, it’s very satisfying indeed. Even the smallest of efforts in the direction of ‘good’ gives us hope.
In shows like Succession where almost all the characters could be described as manipulative or toxic in some way, we find ourselves able to empathise with their individual struggle; Logan, as he faces his greatest foe, his mortality, and his children, hideous as some of their actions are, in turn take on the position of underdog. From the start, we find ourselves pitying them, stuck as they are on a hamster wheel, we suspect is unlikely to take them to the land of patriarchal approval.
The antihero is often placed in the role of underdog. There are many theories on why we like to cheer for the underdog, such as a need to remove unfairness or inequality between those favoured to win and those expected to lose with some researchers saying schadenfreude is behind our support of the underdog. People relate to failure, we’ve all been there. Because we expect bad behaviour in fiction to go punished in some way, while we wait for justice to come for the antihero, at the same time we hope they avoid it because as underdog we see these characters as starting out with odds stacked against them.
There is often some trauma in the past of these protagonists, a backstory they are unable to shake which wins our sympathy. They want to move as far away from this past as possible towards the ideal image they hold of themselves or an ideal place where all their past woes melt away. They believe that when they reach this ideal place, all the conflict that exists between them and society will disappear. Their sense of self is so wrapped up in this belief that they are unable to stop or fully accept responsibility for the destruction they cause to realise their dreams.
There is a tragedy in their decisions that also generates sympathy because the price the antihero is willing to pay to overcome their past, often outweighs the reward of their endeavours. So even if they achieve their outer goals and win, in many ways, they lose.
Likeability is not what the antihero reaches for. Instead they challenge that very human quality: empathy. The antihero gives us permission to look at the world from a different perspective, to stretch the boundaries of our empathy. And maybe there is an element of comfort when we read or watch the antihero. Not only can we match their level of morality easily, we can surpass it. We look good when held up against the antihero. We know we would make different choices. Don’t we?
The End of Us by Olivia Kiernan is published by riverrun
